Regional resellers: Mildura

We catch up with three IT leaders from northern Victoria.

Mark Liddle, Int Tec Mildura

My wife and I met through our work in IT for Victoria Police. We formed an IT company based in Mildura in 1999 and within six months we had our first staff member. We now have a team of 18. We performed a lot of hardware repairs in the early days, but today mainly provide complex solutions including virtualisation, disaster recovery, high-availability, cloud and security.

Our clients rely on IT to manage the tyranny of distance. Businesses in this region are quite progressive with their use of IT with things like cloud, and we have been providing hosted Citrix desktops since 2004.

We pride ourselves on our ability to collaborate with clients to implement systems that enable them to focus on their primary roles. We look after everything from small businesses to larger organisations with multiple sites in Victoria, South Australia and NSW. 

We are well-known in Mildura and place a high value on staff training and keeping up with emerging technology.

FACT FILE

Headcount 18

Established  999

Director Mark Liddle

Main vendors Citrix, Dell, Telstra, VMware, Microsoft 

Jason Jambour, Roms and Rams Computer Technology

Roms and Rams was previously owned by Gerry Sturre. I worked for him for about 13 years before taking it over when he retired two years ago. I used to love playing with computers, and my mum and dad bought me an old Olivetti computer when I was eight.

We do home and business repairs as well as retail sales. Most business repairs are carried out remotely. Recently we also branched out into mobile phone and tablet repairs. Right now it’s just myself, but I am looking at expanding and hiring more staff. 

MSI, Toshiba and Lenovo are three of our more popular laptop brands. Custom-built machines are also popular. Generally, our business involves more repairs than retail sales, but there aren’t many businesses that still do custom builds.

Contract work keeps us busy, too. Recently we upgraded some ATMs, which is a bit different to our usual jobs. There is still great demand for our services even with healthy competition in Mildura.

FACT FILE

Headcount 1

Established 2015

Director Jason Jambour

Main vendors MSI, Toshiba, Lenovo

John Ferrett, Excel Business Electronics

We’ve been going 22 years now. We started from home with my wife Linda and I, but that only lasted about three months before we had to open the shop. We started with the idea that personal, direct service is the best idea for our customers.

We do computers and office equipment, servers and networks. PCs are pretty well available online, which is probably the main reason we specialise in printers and photocopiers: you can’t get copier service online.

People have been saying Mildura is dying for the past 15 years, but I don’t see much difference. It tends to go with the agriculture. As we get rain and don’t have water flow problems, the money flows more freely too. Then we get a drought or the river water dries up and people start to pull back. But there is still money here, even when that happens.

FACT FILE

Headcount 3

Established 1994

Directors John & Linda Ferrett

Main vendors Leader, Ricoh